(Reading early Journals 1959 – 1967 Written in March 2008)
I started reading the Mimi Diary last night — got through all the early writings to Collision with California. O my. What a romantic teenager living in an impossible fantasy realm of heights and depths and deserts. There’s hardly any contact with the real world. The writing is so emotional, poetic and allusive. It’s very hard to tell what’s really happening. Emotions are overblown, but beautifully expressed. Then there’s a lot of intellectualizing, somebody writing about ideas who simply doesn’t have enough life experience to fully understand what she’s writing about. I can see the legacy of alcoholic parents, trauma, and neglect. There’s a quality that reminds me of mother — hard to find words: oversimplified, clichéd, sentimental — example: “For God is high above this earth and beast is only clay”. It’s interesting to note the importance of the quote from Marx: “Man must prove the truth, the reality and power, of his thinking in practice.” That quote was my compass in the fog.
One tremendous thing is I’m able to read all this old writing (Mimi Diary) without judgement. I used to writhe with embarrassment, or get sparked into anger or justification. Now I just feel sad, huge sadness for that poor lost child. She obviously has great gifts, of intelligence, passion, creativity, eloquence, and she isn’t really able to use them at all, she’s floundering in a swamp, unable to focus or channel herself in any effective direction. What a waste!
It does remind me of that journal of Mother’s I read: full of idealistic sentiments. Yes, that’s the word: idealistic. Idealistic and romantic and sentimental.
Still reading from my California days. It’s fascinating and painful. In the middle of semi-hysterical poetic outpourings will be a well articulated mini-essay on parents and children, or relationships. I have no quarrel with any of the ideas I wrote, they still seem correct to me. The hard part was putting them into practice. And always the undertow of self-hate that continually sabotaged my efforts.
Read through the “Year of the Ship” which got me from Fred to Davis. My hysterical descriptions of panic, etc sound like PTSD. From infancy because no flashbacks to any recognizable context.